The central thesis of the protests, and the thing all the governors get wrong here, is that there is no greater crime in democratic society than the disproportionate misuse of state violence against its own citizens. Everything else pales in comparison.

Once you've got there, you have the state deployment of force against its own citizenry without democratic legitimacy. It's a fundamental abandonment of the rule of law itself.

When a man breaks a window, he violates the law and hurts the shop owner and his neighborhood. But when an official misuses--and is permitted to misuse--the power of the state to attack citizens without proportionality, the crime is far deeper against the legitimacy of law itself